%0 Journal Article %1 donnet2012revealing %A Donnet, Benoit %A Luckie, Matthew %A Mérindol, Pascal %A Pansiot, Jean-Jacques %D 2012 %I Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) %J ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review %K internet mpls network tcpip traceroute tunnel %N 2 %P 87–93 %R 10.1145/2185376.2185388 %T Revealing MPLS tunnels obscured from traceroute %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2185376.2185388 %V 42 %X Operators have deployed Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) in the Internet for over a decade. However, its impact on Internet topology measurements is not well known, and it is possible for some MPLS configurations to lead to false router-level links in maps derived from traceroute data. In this paper, we introduce a measurement-based classification of MPLS tunnels, identifying tunnels where IP hops are revealed but not explicitly tagged as label switching routers, as well as tunnels that obscure the underlying path. Using a large-scale dataset we collected, we show that paths frequently cross MPLS tunnels in today's Internet: in our data, at least 30% of the paths we tested traverse an MPLS tunnel. We also propose and evaluate several methods to reveal MPLS tunnels that are not explicitly flagged as such: we discover that their fraction is significant (up to half the explicit tunnel quantity) but most of them do not obscure IP-level topology discovery.

@article{donnet2012revealing, abstract = {Operators have deployed Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) in the Internet for over a decade. However, its impact on Internet topology measurements is not well known, and it is possible for some MPLS configurations to lead to false router-level links in maps derived from traceroute data. In this paper, we introduce a measurement-based classification of MPLS tunnels, identifying tunnels where IP hops are revealed but not explicitly tagged as label switching routers, as well as tunnels that obscure the underlying path. Using a large-scale dataset we collected, we show that paths frequently cross MPLS tunnels in today's Internet: in our data, at least 30% of the paths we tested traverse an MPLS tunnel. We also propose and evaluate several methods to reveal MPLS tunnels that are not explicitly flagged as such: we discover that their fraction is significant (up to half the explicit tunnel quantity) but most of them do not obscure IP-level topology discovery.}, added-at = {2023-12-22T12:11:38.000+0100}, author = {Donnet, Benoit and Luckie, Matthew and Mérindol, Pascal and Pansiot, Jean-Jacques}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2a7cd17953cf86f8a54eebdbd25c56b53/tabularii}, description = {Revealing MPLS tunnels obscured from traceroute | acm sigcomm}, doi = {10.1145/2185376.2185388}, interhash = {a8e9d3067581ca1a0554f3d08bd58341}, intrahash = {a7cd17953cf86f8a54eebdbd25c56b53}, issn = {0146-4833}, journal = {ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review}, keywords = {internet mpls network tcpip traceroute tunnel}, month = mar, number = 2, pages = {87–93}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)}, timestamp = {2023-12-22T12:12:09.000+0100}, title = {Revealing MPLS tunnels obscured from traceroute}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2185376.2185388}, volume = 42, year = 2012 }